Fostering Equality and Social Justice Empowering Curricula

Click here for Zoom recording of this session!

Moderator: Paula Rees, UMass Amherst

Centering Racial Equity in Honors

Jenny Olin Shanahan, Bridgewater State University

Jibril Solomon, Bridgewater State University

Disproportionately low numbers of racially minoritized students participate in Honors Programs and Colleges because of deficit-minded policies and inaccurate notions of who “deserves” admission. Honors acceptance favors students (who are predominantly white) with access to the “shadow education” of test-preparation and other enhancement programs. In response, equity-minded efforts for inclusive Honors admissions and student success at Bridgewater State University (BSU) have resulted in significantly increased racial and ethnic diversity. Since 2017, the number of BIPOC students in BSU’s first-year honors cohort has increased from 9% to 31%. Each year now, BIPOC honors student persistence meets or exceeds white honors student persistence at BSU. Participation and success in Honors by racially minoritized students has grown due to several changes, including more purposeful and inclusive recruitment, “BIPOC in Honors” admissions events, changes to practices and policies, BIPOC student- and faculty-led outreach and advising, and more diverse curricular and co-curricular offerings. We are working to overturn decades of white supremacist assumptions about who is “Honors material” and to close racial opportunity gaps. The AY22-23 first-year Honors cohort is the largest and most diverse in BSU history; we are committed to their academic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal success. Our presentation will share a set of guiding principles for Honors recruitment, admissions, curriculum, co-curriculum, and assessment, with the goal that BIPOC students are supported, included, and welcomed in Honors at BSU and other majority-white institutions.

Curriculum Development with a Multicultural Perspective

Emrah Pektas, University of Massachusetts Amherst

I will present my experiences with a course called Curriculum Development that I taught undergrads (N=25) during the fall semester, 2022, at the College of Education in the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Can curriculum foster equality, democracy, and social justice? How? Can curriculum perpetuate oppression? How? What makes a curriculum just or unjust? These are some of big questions that the course aimed to help students explore and have joy during this exploration. Curriculum determines who gets or is deprived of what opportunities. In this sense, there is a close link between curriculum and power. To help students reveal this link, the course is structured around three strands including social justice: How To Do It Strand, Social Justice Strand, and Learning Theories Strand. Throughout the semester, students examined the cultural, political, economic, and ideological bases of curriculum, how state standards could be biased, how to incorporate diversity and multiculturalism into curriculum, how curriculum can advance oppression and/or social justice, the relationships among curriculum, instruction, assessment, and social justice. Students read about “best practices” of curriculum design including Wiggins & McTighe’s (2005) Understanding By Design and Sleeter’s (2005) Un-Standardizing Curriculum, wrote weekly reflection journals on readings, were engaged with discussions around readings, reviewed and critically analyzed an existing curriculum, and finally developed their own unit/curriculum with a focus of multiculturalism for their future students. Participants will learn how to view curriculum design and their courses in a different perspective such as multicultural and racial perspectives.

Critical Media Literacy as a Strategy to Demystify Systemic Inequities and Empower Students

Ali Söken, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This presentation aims to share my experience as an educator around the Education and Film (EdFilm) class I am teaching on media literacy in UMass Amherst’s Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies department. Critical media literacy (CML) promotes critical consumption of media and helps people become active producers of media that support their own complex identities. EdFilm has helped students to develop self- and social awareness by encouraging them to critically think about their interaction with the media, and helping them to comprehend systemic issues around race, gender, and social class (Söken & Nygreen, 2021).

I teach one section of EdFilm, designed for first-year students (n=30), which includes diverse materials (movies, documentaries, videos, articles, etc.), community-building activities (regular check-ins, small group work), discussions, and short lectures. Based on the course evaluation survey, students shared the relevancy of the concepts, and appreciated having a space to build a community for talking about social problems. My students are predominantly white middle-class students from MA, and this class is a space to realize their privileges and understand the systemic structures that affect their peers based on their identities. As critical pedagogy suggested, I try to build a horizontal relationship in the classroom to implement the idea of “teacher-student with students-teachers.” In this practice, I frame joy as “empowerment” and “learning” that makes it possible for my students to understand how media works as a system and naturalizes the values of the dominant groups.